Major kudos to the Knight Foundation for making major bets on a variety of hyperlocal citizens media projects with its News Challenge grants. This is an important endorsement of the need to experiment with new forms of media that can energize and bring together communities by providing local information in new and exciting ways.
By giving people like the brilliant Adrian Holovaty $1.1 million to chase new directions in this field, Knight is placing an important bet on what's possible. It will be fascinating to see how these projects progress now that they've gotten significant funding--something that's been largely lacking in hyperlocal experiments to date.
As we learned with Backfence, this stuff isn't easy—but it's got enormous potential. Scarcely a day goes by that I don't hear some smart new-media person predict confidently that somebody is going to figure out how to make hyperlocal work and become one of the great media success stories.
Everybody in the mainstream news business should be watching closely and participating in these experiments. Local is the one defensible franchise that newspapers have left—and they should be trying to figure out how to aggressively capitalize on this phenomenon with investments like the ones the Knight Foundation is making. More than anything else, hyperlocal may be the salvation of newspapers. Otherwise, with smart, well-funded rivals like Holovaty, it may be their last stand.
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